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July 21, 2006

Henry Luce on American Masters

I watched the American Masters biography of Henry Luce last night. Though I've associated his name with the Time-Life empire, I never really knew his background or influence. Some quick notes:

• When Time first started, Luce and co-founder Briton Hadden did no actual reporting. Not only that, they were literally making details like characterizations of world leaders up. The impression I got is that they were melding literary devices with wire stories to make the reader feel like they were present while events were happening, something that writers later on would use intrepid reporting to perfect. Reading articles in the archives, I get the impression that the ledes of these articles tended to beat around the bush:

  If you go out of Washington by the northwest, you will pass the Chevy Chase Country Club. There is a links. It was somewhere near the eleventh or twelfth hole—accounts vary—somewhere near one of these holes, on a pleasant June day, that a foursome was in progress.
  
  Out of Russia, weird and mystic land, whose soul is steeped in the mysterious, the fire of whose eyes is sometimes fanatical, and whose life breath has been impregnated with flesh-creeping legends, comes a story, intrinsically Russian in its bizarre setting.

• Time Magazine's design, even early on, seemed impeccable, melding great typography with beautiful charcoal sketches, on the cover. Luce's magazines always had great art direction – especially Fortune Magazine, which had some of the best spreads, art and photography I've ever seen. As American Masters Stephen Stept says in this interview:

  And Fortune magazine - oh my God. When I first started doing the research for the NEH proposals [that funded the script and production], I thought that somewhere in there we'd have to do something on Fortune, thinking that as a business mag it would be of limited cinematic interest. And then I finally got my hands on the original issues from the 30s and 40s. You have never seen a magazine like this! Gorgeous cover art, inside pages on thick textured paper, exquisite photos, and brilliant storytelling in a hand sewn binding - an issue today would cost in the neighborhood of $15, and no publisher would dare do it. There is nothing else like it. It tells you a lot about Luce: his insistence on quality, his artistic approach to business and journalism, and his supreme confidence in the capitalist enterprise. The first issue came out two months after the stock market crash of '29.

• Later, Time Magazine developed the concept of group reporting, in which multiple field correspondents wire stories back to editors and writers at the home office. Then these writers compiled the different reports into one cohesive story. While purporting to be a filter of objectivity, what often happened is that higher-ups like Luce would distort the field reports to hue to their editorial objectives, resulting in blatant subjectivity. In addition, the stories would be once removed from the actual source. Hello, Fox News Network.
• I didn't realize how much influence Luce had over the anti-Communism movement. However, he contradicted himself by hiring writers in the 30s whom he knew were Communist sympathizers.
• David Halberstam on Luce:

  It (when Luce's sympathy for China's totalitarian leader Chiang Kai Shek over Communists resulted in Time being wrong about the Communist takeover) was a historic juncture for our country. Do we accept the reality of the rest of the world, or do we try to impose, as Luce cared to do, his reality on what the rest of the world should be like?

  One can see the implications of this in our current administration's outlook. One person in the documentary termed Luce a man "with 19th century views in the 20th century whose outlook would come to define the 21st century."
• Gore Vidal on Time's McCarthyist style (now echoed by Karl Rove and the Republican party): "(it was) hit and run. Make a charge. Chuck away from it. Deny you ever said it. Print a retraction on page 340. That was the Time style."

Posted by timothompson at July 21, 2006 10:51 AM